GARDENING is a national passion. But what are we really doing toiling away in
our gardens? If we think it puts us back in touch with nature, the facts don’t
bear that out. A lawn that aspires to be a billiard table, or a herbaceous border full of disciplined, exotic plants are
far from natural. Indeed, in gardening, we struggle against nature. Her
tendency is to freeze or flatten our cherished and cultivated plants -
distorted through generations of horticulture from their natural state and
often removed vast distances from their original habitat - to replace them with
her own familiar army of uncouth natives: couch grass, buttercup and nettle.
Adam and Eve were gardeners, but can we hope to get closer to their innocent,
natural state through B&Q or the garden centre?

Another way of looking at it is that, far from getting in touch with nature, in
fighting against weeds and weather we are actually subconsciously engaged in
externalising the struggle between nature and order which shapes our moral
lives and society in general.

Gardening then becomes a bit like going to church, a study in ethics. That
seems remote from any idea you may have of why you spend time pulling weeds,
but Little Sparta - Ian Hamilton Finlay’s astonishing garden high up in the
Lanarkshire hills - in fact declares itself just such a study in ethics even by
its name. Sparta’s legendary military prowess was a product of discipline and
rustic simplicity of life. In contrast, the sophisticated luxury of Athens (or
Edinburgh, from which Finlay withdrew to cultivate his garden 40 years ago) led
to softness and decadence.

Jean Jacques Rousseau was Finlay’s guide and mentor in this. In contrast to
Spartan simplicity, wrote Rousseau, in such decadent societies: "The
sciences, letters, and arts... spread garlands of flowers over the iron chains
with which [men] are laden, throttle in them the sentiment of that original
freedom for which they seemed born, make them love their slavery, and fashion
them into what is called civilised peoples."

It is a radical point of view, but Finlay is nothing if not radical.
Nevertheless, there are gardens and gardens. There are no billiard table lawns
at Little Sparta, no borders of exotic flowers. It is, in fact, a landscape
garden. Instead of enclosed parterres in geometric patterns proclaiming the
human imposition of order on wild nature, the first landscape gardens emulated
nature’s informality.

The ambition was to see the garden as continuous with, not apart from, nature,
and to smooth over the join between them. They asserted connection, not
separation. The Scots played a precocious part in this. In the late 17th
century Sir William Bruce began to design gardens where the focus of house and
garden together was some feature in the landscape beyond their confines: at
Kinross, the island in Loch Leven; the Bass Rock at Balcaskie.

It is a measure of how important gardens are to us that this entailed a
profound philosophic shift. It suggested human life, even domestic life, was
part of nature and continuous with it, rather than forever in opposition to it.
So, it followed, to make sense of life, you looked at humanity in nature and
nature in humanity together, not apart.

This became the Enlightenment project. For Rousseau it already meant gardening
was a place to look for the answers, not herbaceous borders, but useful
cultivation, and also, crucially, cultivated wilderness, an intermediate place
where communication with nature was possible. It was partly because of Rousseau
that this also became the business of poetry and art; landscape gardens were
often poetic in the references, just as Finlay is a poet and Little Sparta is
itself a kind of extended poem.

Toward the end of Rousseau’s life, at Ermenonville
north of Paris, René de Girardin created a landscape
garden as a retreat for Rousseau and an informal place for contemplation in
rustic simplicity. For the last few months of his life, Rousseau retired there
and he was buried there on an island in an ornamental lake. As Rousseau was
Finlay’s inspiration, so Little Sparta emulates Ermenonville.

This relationship is the subject of The Philosopher’s Garden at GOMA, an
exhibition of photographs taken at Ermenonville and
Little Sparta by Robin Gillanders. Gillanders’s beautiful photographs of Ermenonville
take as their theme Rousseau’s last work, his Reveries of a Solitary Walker.

The photographs - black and white and four feet square - are beautifully
matched to the contemplative mood of the Reveries. They are divided into a
series of promenades, or walks. Each picture is matched with great subtlety to
an accompanying quotation from each of the ten walks in sequence.

It is a measure of Finlay’s importance that the connection proposed here takes
us back to the central ideas of the Enlightenment and the importance of the
Franco-Scottish exchange. There was a vital connection between Rousseau himself
and Scottish thought - and personally with Scotland’s greatest radical thinker,
David Hume.

They had in common the idea that the key to human nature is feeling, not
reason. If Rousseau owed much in this to Hume, he also turned it independently
into a radical critique of society. This had profound political consequences in
the French Revolution. And Finlay completes the circle by making an analogy
between gardening and the French Revolution.

Gardeners and revolutionaries alike must cut and prune, even uproot if
necessary. As Finlay puts it: "Both the garden
style called ‘sentimental’ and the French Revolution grew from Rousseau. The
garden trellis and the guillotine are alike entwined with the honeysuckle of
the new sensibility."

All this points to the part that Scottish radical thought played in the
cataclysm of the revolution, as it had already done in the American Revolution.

Taking up these themes as he has done in all his work, Finlay offers us a
perspective on our heritage certainly, but he also suggests our gentle passion
for gardening may actually be part of it, too.

If Finlay’s art is radical, it is also highly focused. It forces you to think
fresh thoughts in unexpected areas. The same cannot be said of the new
exhibition at the CCA, Risk, though it declares its radical intentions in every
crowded inch. It is a protest at the whole obnoxious complex of power, money
and politics that has given us the Iraq war, the degradation of the environment
and the prospect of the whole food chain becoming a capitalist monopoly through
the imposition on us of GM foods. Both topics and timing make it a preamble to
the protests planned for the G8 summit.

Art can be highly political. Think of Goya, George Grosz or even the thriving
tradition of political caricature in this country. But although there are more
than 30 artists taking part in Risk, it is really impossible to identify a
single work by a single artist, or even by a group of artists, that rises in a
clear voice above the general babble of protest, or that focuses radical
thought in a single trenchant image. Art can contribute powerfully to protest,
but it does not do so here. And it is downright wrong, not to say
self-defeating, to declare in large letters in the foyer: "The economic
value of public art is to increase the value of private property".

Finally, what of Avril Paton, who has a major
retrospective at the Mitchell Library? Ten years ago she became an object of
enormous popular interest with pictures like Windows in the West. Inspired by
Edward Hopper she paints a Glasgow tenement at dusk. The curtains not yet drawn,
we can see in. It is a gentle piece of voyeurism.

She has done it again in a painting called Bedsits, and she has used the same
literal realism in a variety of paintings of Glasgow scenes. Like those of the
Victorian painter William Powell Frith, the interest is in her observation of
the natural diversity in any crowd. They don’t go beyond that, and I am afraid
it is better to pass over in silence the abstract "art" pictures that
make up the bulk of this show.


The Philosopher’s Garden until 8 May; Risk until 14 May; and New Looks until 16
April.